Anyone interested in helping start a more "mainstream" version of the Daily Paul?

This subject has been broached often. I have often taken "vacations" from the DP due to "feeling" disgusted with some topics and posts and replies; BUT, I keep coming back because the variety is so varied that the information I am looking for is most likely here any given day.

I have learned to pass up that which I know will be offensive or "kooky". I think a part of growing up is allowing others to grow at a different rate. One of the best and most important attributes of maturity, wisdom and greatness is patience. The ultimate example is God. "The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power." Nahum 1:3 If God wasn't so patient with all of us, we'd all be in Hell already.

I am no longer offended by the atheist attacks, the rude comments, the wacky subjects (BTW, I believe 9-11 was an inside job, or at least a cover-up) or any of the "negative things you mentioned. And I agree with one posters comment that such an idea would narrow the scope of the thinking of the visitors to this site.

Dedication to the principles of liberty make me come here to see how things are going and get my news. Since the MSM is not to be trusted, I no longer watch the TV news (I don't have cable either). This is where I get most of my news along with the zillions of forwarded article I get from friends.

If you get offended by something you read here or by someone's "ad hominum" attack, perhaps you can divorce your emotions from the situation and be glad you live in a country where there is freedom of speech. I may not like how someone else communicates, but I will fight for their right to communicate however they feel is appropriate. They will learn or not learn from their mistakes and choices.

More and more I am for more and more freedom ( please, nobody attack my redundancy, it might hurt my precious little feelings. lol), which includes your freedom to write this post and your freedom to start your own site. In the meantime, I will continue to come back to the DP whenever I want to, which is nearly every day.

"Great peace have they that love thy law and nothing shall offend them." Psalm 119:165

A web site that has thought narks to abolish "finge" issues. Sounds free to me.
Live and let live. If you don't like the post. Let it go. Or in case of bizzare opinions such as this I will take the liberty to exercise my first amenedment.
This site is detramental to the movement? The big brother movement?

.

Control freaks!

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"So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause."

I hope the new site will be moderated so that only acceptable discussion will take place. I, for one, am more comfortable in hierarchical organizations. ;-)

I suspect some believe that I would be better off on the "mainstream" site...I'm too serious and too scholarly. But you won't find me jumping ship anytime soon. The problem I have with your idea is the spirit in which it was offered. You label people with ideas other than your own as "kooks." I am reluctant to discount their ideas unless I have spent time investigating them myself--and frankly, I am too busy researching things that interest me to decide whether their viewpoints have any validity. In a very few instances I am willing to accept some ideas at face value because I personally know and respect the persons who posted it.

What especially bothers me is that you posted without first creatiing this "mainstream" website. You state that the quality of the Daily Paul has diminished because the "fringe" (your term, not mine) topics have dominated the forums. Of course you would never advise Michael Nystrom or the moderators to censor such topics, but by criticizing them in this way, I suspect you--and others like you--hope to effect a "chill" of free discourse on this site. This movement needs a variety of voices. What it does not need are people who are willing to identify and enforce taboos, and I thought that kind of authoritarianism--in government, in our personal lives--was what we were trying to resist.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson

and if you had an ounce of respect you would take his advice.
Furthermore us "kooks" as you call us are here to stay forever exposing anything that is detrimental to human happiness, liberty and freedom. One would think you would have left long ago...

ps. there is a delete button when you edit your op, I suggest using it and getting rid of this post and then finding a new home say maybe here:
http://www.campaignforlib...
.

http://www.ronpaulsingles...

Paper Ballots Hand Counted At The Precinct Or Bust
Support WTP Federal Supreme Court Case To Ban All Electronic Voting Or Forget 2010 or 2012
http://www.wethepeoplefou...

are just fun to laugh at. There is tons of good information here, but like everything on the internet you have to sift through the chaff. There is kooky and false stuff represented on CNN and Fox too.
I would visit a fringe free site, but I remember when RP was just a fringe candidate.

Go away. Many of these "fringe" ideas are turning out to be real. I'm tired of folks like you. You are what's detrimental to the "movement".

www.theanonymousamerican.... same idea but trying to stay away from what many consider fringe topics... still a very young site.

Hi WCU4Paul,

I'm new here but I used to post regularly in the early days of the Ron Paul Forums, but left after they continued to censor my posts about the Federal Reserve. The moderators believed it was a conspiracy theory. My posts about the coming New World Order weren't very welcomed either. And of course the ones about 911. I used to even get crap from them for simply posting that Ron Paul would be on the Alex Jones show.

It was hard to believe that a Ron Paul forum was being run by people who didn't understand the value of free speech. I felt I should be able to post my opinion, no matter what it is, as long as I am not disruptive or rude. Our founding fathers valued free speech, and listed the Bill of Rights in order of importance, with free speech right at the top. But I guess the moderators over there didn't understand their reasoning for that.

The "fringe" issues you mention are only "fringe" because the establishment keeps it so. So you would be playing right into their hands, by keeping important issues and alternative views from the general public, in my opinion.

I've noticed that many people like yourself believe that something that is "fringe" is bad. But wasn't Columbus' view of the world considered fringe at the time? And the views Copernicus and Galileo? Which side of the fence would you have been on as they dragged these men to prison for their non-mainstream (but absolutely correct) views on the universe? Would it have served mankind better by keeping their unpopular views silent?

You might look into the major polls that have been taken over the years and you will see that the majority of Americans do not believe the official government 911 story. So it's OK to talk about one of the biggest events in US history. It's really OK WCU4Paul - you wouldn't be "fringe".

~WannaBfree

thinking out loud and stuff.

I still think a new Ron Paul site, geared towards politics only, or just mainstream topics is a good idea.
You grease em up there, then send them here.

Just think how it would be if posts were deliberately censored. No thanks.

It looks like we're all moving over here
http://our.gop.com/Groups...

"mainstream"=compromising

With Freedom Comes Responsibility

As for me, I am staying put here at the DailyPaul. I like being at a place where people think alike, for the most part, and don't have to argue their points or try to convince others. But, good luck either way.

* Gather your support for this, network, and just go do it! Good luck !

****
"I think we are living in a world of lies: lies that don't even know they are lies, because they are the children and grandchildren of lies." ~ Chris Floyd

I don't think a more mainstream version is possible. MANY Ron Paul supporters are 9/11 truthers and 'conspiracy theorists'. The 'crazy' you talk about is what makes our movement different from all others. 'Crazy' is what draws attention and more often then not, 'crazy' is truth. If you were to jump back two years, the principles of our movement sounded radical and 'crazy' to the majority of America, which is one reason why we were shunned. As time went on and the crazies gained momentum and turned on the loud speakers, the movement grew rapidly and naturally became more mainstream. Ron Paul supporters are smart intellectuals, and I believe they know what is hurting the movement and what the boundaries are. Lastly, I don't think we should care what others think because we are sovereign individuals that know what the truth is and know who they are as supporters, individuals, and proponents of the movement.

where you are coming from. However, I enjoy the varied conversation. Dr. Paul once said in a recent interview (i believe recently) that we should stop trying to be so judgmental with one another. I believe we should try to embrace this as best we can (I am surely guilty of being this at times). Perhaps a rating system like Netflix as one suggested. If it is not your cup of tea then you would not get that many if any stories about those topics. I believe one of the best traits of this growing community is that most are tolerable of other people's views and that liberty and individual freedom is what brings us together. Not everyone will agree on every specific issue but one I believe so is that government is too big and our individual freedoms are be gradually picked apart.

I like all the varied topics as long as the promotion of liberty, individual freedom, and knowing ones rights (the main ideas of Dr. Paul) are the main focus. I would suggest more categories for certain "exceptional" stories perhaps some type of tagging system.

Just my opinion.

First post, long time reader.

We need to mass market today's version of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense", that is based upon educating the people, and rededicating ourselves to the objectives of the American Revolution all over again, and abolishing the corrupt Monopolies, the Banking Elites, and the Imperial Conquest abroad -- and rallying the people around the simple concept of actually following the U.S. Constitution.

Keep us informed about your plans...

keep up the good work

is this fringe?
http://www.youtube.com/wa...

I advertise on this site, and I read it often but haven't posted in a long time. Why? Maybe its just the nature of political blogs as a whole, but there are a lot of personal attacks. Just sayin.....

and I agree that sometimes we have kooks on here, we must remember that ANYONE who would be for Ron Paul would be sick of the status quo, ie "mainstream". If there was a mainstream one of these forums, I wouldn't think of going there.

... from the previous thread. After name-calling, there was a gratuitous "( No Offense... )" followup.

Bullsheet. I'd never come to someone's house, insult their honored guests, slap them in the face, then try to humor the host with a modicum of flattery.

Have you no shame?

-Michael
(I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken)

As a RP supporter, this is the last website I would recommend if someone asked me for a good RP site.

I would $upport your new website. Just let me know.

There actually is something that could be done to improve the quality and image of the DailyPaul (and, indirectly, the CFL) without resorting to an alternative website. (However, any hypothetical alternative to DailyPaul should incorporate something like this anyway to keep it from succombing to the same problems.)

A collaborative filtering mechanism should be used to rate posts/ comments. This is the type of software used by Netflix to create each user's "Recommended For You" profile.

Don't mistake this for the common "Thumbs Up/Down", favorites, subscriptions, or blacklist filtering mechanisms already in use on a number of websites. This is so much more sophisticated as to make this a fundamentally different concept.

Remember, Netflix just awarded some programmers a million dollar prize for improving their prediction success rate by just 10%! (And it was already pretty good.) BTW, this type of program is NOT limited to predicting movie preferences.

As the user rates different posts/comments, the software would start to prioritize the "Active Forum Topics" list. Instead of showing the most recent posts first, it would show those posts most likely to be OF MOST INTEREST to that user.

For example, let's say that a user is tired of seeing all of the chemtrail posts. After awhile, WITHOUT having to pay attention to who is making those posts, he would start to see fewer and fewer of them.

No one would be prohibited from posting anything about whatever they wanted. But if what they had to say was of little or no interest to a particular reader, that reader would automatically see less of that poster's submissions.

This is NOT censorship. This is more like freedom of association taken to an intellectual space.

This would not suppress discussion or debate, it would just make it more productive. People would not have to rate posts if they did not wish to. In that case their experience on the DailyPaul would not change at all. And even those that utilized the rating system would not automatically eliminate posts (or posters) with which they disagreed.

As you have discovered, you can respect a poster's intelligence and information without agreeing with his conclusions. You can agree strongly about core issues and disagree about fringe issues. All of this would be reflected in the results of the collaborative filtering mechanism.

On the other hand, the only people that would fall below your radar would be those whose viewpoints were so divergent from your own as to make meaningful discussion with them almost impossible. Those posters with the most obsessive and narrow range of interests would move up or down in your preference list the fastest. And that would be better for everyone concerned.

As time goes by, the DailyPaul experience would improve for everyone. Those contributors whose posts you value the most would become more and more prominent.

This would attract and KEEP those readers/posters most interested in the core values of our movement.
It would automatically make the experience more frustrating for those whose chief interest is in forcing others to see the "Truth" of their own pet cause (or the flamers, moles, and trolls who want nothing more than to spread dissension and bitterness on this site).

Michael would still have the ability to "sticky" whatever he wanted onto the front page.
But it would avoid the very real risks associated with a panel of moderators using their own judgment (however well-intentioned) to "improve" the website.

Software like this should not be expensive. (In fact I think that one of the stipulations for the Netflix prize was that the software be "open source".)
But this would require a decision on Michael's part to seriously upgrade the quality of his site.

******************************
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

Natural Law and Natural Rights

http://jim.com/rights.htm...

the one thing DP is in serious danger of is groupthink.

I also feel bad for the newbies. Getting through the clique to become a regular member is tough.

then we can publish only the things that the government wants us to publish, and show you the facts that the government wants you to see. 'cause if you don't believe what the government is telling you, you MUST be crazy!

Gosh that went over well. LOL
Mainstream... LIke Drudge Report or something?
Ya know something, we did just fine before you came along and we'll continue to do just fine when you've gone to your "mainstream" home.
Good riddance!